[SallyintNorth]

The discussion about profit is interesting but I think deserves a thread of its own, rather than being buried and woven in amongst the single measure of lambing percentage.

One year I might decide to calculate a lambs reared/sold over ewes put to tup - but it's not easy as we may buy in ewes with lambs, store lambs, and/or in-lamb ewes; we will usually have some lambs still here from last year when we start lambing, etc.

It's hard for us to calculate some of the business measures which would be interesting - for instance, we buy a cake that we feed to both cattle and sheep; some of the meds ditto; hay goes to both too; we spend a fortune on fuel for the quad bike and I bet a large percentage of that could be apportioned to the sheep but of course we check the cattle daily too...

On rearing grass fed lambs vs supplemented lambs, it's not always as straightforward as it seems.  You won't put the final 'bloom' on a top-class lamb with grass only, at least you won't up here.  So to get the top grades and hence prices you do need to feed a little cake to finish them.  And if you can finish them earlier you may get them to market ahead of your neighbours and get better prices.  Singles finish much quicker than twins, need very little cake (may even finish off their mothers) and single-bearing mothers need hardly anything - so on our farm at least there's an argument that a good single can be a better outcome than twins.

[Garmoran]

Cheviot and cheviot cross ewes to a cheviot tup on very hard hill: a little over 100%. About 10% of ewes have twins although I'd prefer them not to. I try to keep ewe lambs from the tups though I'm not always successful with this.

Average price for lambs this September/October: £25. I'd rather not think about the cost of production and factoring in the cost of my time probably would make me suicidal

[Big Light]

The question is lambing percentage , not rearing or weaning percentage ( all of which can be usefull measurements) from that my definition is the number of lamb measured against ewes tupped from that you can not only measure, as Rosemary says, against others but also adjust your own husbandry on a yearly basis to achieve what is best for your own circumstances and along with the weaning or rearing percentage therefore it can be used to maximise profit whether that's by producing loads of lambs per ewe or just singles depends on what circumstances you have however if you don't actually measure what comes out, then you can't work out what conditioning of the ewe to aim for best results in the first place.